


The Tales of the Crossroads

by MidnightTrashGoblin



Category: Akakios - Fandom, The Town at the Crossroads - Fandom
Genre: Origin Stories, have fun motherfuckers, poetic as fuck, possible triggers so like, tik tok tag, town at the crossroads discord, watch for those at the beginning of chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-01-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:20:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22442461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MidnightTrashGoblin/pseuds/MidnightTrashGoblin
Summary: The poetic backstories of Akakios, the Town at the Crossroads, as written by me- your resident midnight trash goblin.General warnings: many of these chapters will deal with difficult topics due to the backstory of the characters. These might include death, murder, self harm, phsyical abuse, and so on. I will be putting warnings at the beginning of the individual chapters. Though most of these topics won't be in detail, only poetically described if that makes sense? Enjoy!
Kudos: 6





	1. Ashes Reborn

**Author's Note:**

> This first chapter references some death, minor describing of burnt bodies.

“The blood on my teeth begins to taste like a poem, like religion, like the way you look at me.” - Sean Glatch, from “Caffeine, Pt. 1”

The blood is familiar. The taste of ash in the air- a memory. Saltwater tears crash into the dirt like the tides against the sands and the smell of petrichor is overridden by the smoke that fills the lungs. Heat beats like a drum against the skin and the sky is dark with plumes of the dead.

She sits in the ash, surrounded by the skeleton remains of a crumbling civilization. Encompassed by the charred corpses of her devastating wrath. Behind her spread wings of feather soft ember and flame, beautiful weapons of mass destruction. Eyes of gold stare out into the red horizon, silhouettes of ghosts haunting her vision.

She is so used to the crowds of hell, so used to the destruction wrought by her own talons sinking into the flesh of the innocents that have had the misfortune of getting in her way.

Oh long ago she was innocent. Long ago she was a bird against the clouds, naive and pure. Long ago she was an Icarus, reaching for the skies with curious and inventive fingers. Yearning for freedom.

Until she fell in love with the sun.

Fell in love with the burning fingers pressed against her wings, fell in love with the hand prints seared into her bones.

And oh how she melted. Her wax wings dripping devastation across the world below, creating wreckage across the fields of humanity that lay in her wake. They speak of gods who’s heartbreak can destroy entire countries, bring even the greatest of worlds to its knees, and she may not be divine, but her suffering was something holy.

It was there in the pooling blood of regret and memory that they found her. There that the shadow crossed the road with a hand outstretched and eyes that were both kind and terrifying.

They say the devil has pitch black bones and skin made of broken dynasties. They say the devil’s voice gurgles with virgin blood and their horns are the ashes of gods.

What they don’t tell you is of their beauty, of the universe that makes up their skin and the supernova within their soul. They forget to tell you that Lucifer was an angel once, a Morningstar amongst the darkest of skies. Neither created nor destroyed. Divine. Holy. Immaculate.

“You are meant to be reborn in the ash, little bird, not to bathe in it,” the devil says, voice smooth as it slips off the velvet of their tongue. “Come, let us go home.”

But what is home to someone so old? What is home to someone whose past is etched in the burnt remains of their decay? So she does not move. She does not look away from the horizon. She waits instead. Waits for that silhouette against the sun, that spot of black against the red that she so desperately wants to see.

She’s unsure of how long she sits there, the ash an inky black that stains her skin like a brand and the smoke that clings to her back like a monster weighing her down.

“What do you wait for, little bird?”

The devil sits when she finally draws her eyes away from the track of memories leading away from her. Their presence is heavy beside her with the weight of the stars and constellations in their gaze.

Grief scrapes the inside of her throat like razor blades and her words taste like acid on her tongue. “He’ll be back,” she says. “He always comes back.”

The devil hums and tilts their head. Spirals of darkness shift around their face, reflecting the flames in the distance. “Do you want him to?”

  
She wavers, craters in her amber eyes and chaos raging in an empty mind. Her bones quiver with exhaustion, panic wild and burning against her skin like an old friend. She is mottled with scars and eaten away by a raging fire. She is an ocean’s battered shore, the mountain’s crumbled sides, but the presence beside her is a forced calm, an eternity of patience.

“I wanted a shop,” she says, voice like a collapsing star.

“And he didn’t.”

It wasn’t a question. The devil didn’t ask questions they didn’t know the answer to. But their presence is an embrace, growing flowers between her ribs and filling her grief with moss.

“I have nowhere to go now,” the little bird said, drowning in the smoke that bellows from her lungs. “He’ll come back. He’ll find me. He always does.”

The devil nods, tongue laced with molten silver, cadence carried across gentle breezes and screamed in clashes of thunder. They ask again. “Do you want him to?”

Her reply is soft, a whisper hidden in the sounds of drums.

“No,” she says.

The devil stands then, looking up into a sky filled with stardust. There is a regret in their eyes, deep beneath the calm and the storms. They stand against the flames and the destruction. Unmoving. A darkened shadow.

Here stands the fallen, she thinks to herself. Here stands the brightest star in heaven, cast out and left to rot. Yet still they stand, back against the world and yearning for those burning, dying gods.

Oh how wrong they were to cast this beauty away, for they forget that the devil is still a star. Burning long after death. Chaos in a dark vacuum of nothing. Constantly shining, constantly breathing, constantly creating.

She asks them why they love the stars so much, why they stare up at them with the hope of a thousand suns.

“Because they are free,” the devil says.

And when they offer their hand again, she takes it. Wildfire meeting hellfire. Ash meeting sulfur. And little by little she falls towards the stars, for there is no darkness within them.

When she opens her shop in a haven full of hope, she calls it the sun. For the fall cannot be stopped, and little by little- light.

And they are monsters, the both of them. Monsters they built themselves. Monsters that have grown accustomed to the universe. And monsters have their power, stories best told in memories.

Oh we have been human.

Ask us what we remember.


	2. Whispered Memories

“Silly girl, your different was your beautiful all along.” - Atticus

“Athena.”

It’s the screams that wake her, piercing through her skin like blades of ice. It’s the screams that surround her, bombard her like cannons across empty fields.

The earth remembers, relives it’s pain over and over again. Agony seeps into the dirt like ichor, heavy and staining and shaking with the demons of the past.

Her fingers are pale marble against clay mud. Earthquake tremors seize her muscles, yearning, aching. Her tears are holy water- drip, drip, dripping on nature’s floor. Her bones are made of broken glass and haunted battlefields.

For a moment she feels powerful and ancient, her soul weighing too heavy in her chest and her memories a lonely monster lost in the emptiness of her mind. Her teeth don’t feel sharp enough. Her stomach aches with homesickness. There is the taste of blood and honey on her tongue that she cannot be rid of.

Scales and serpents surround her, holding too tight to her scalp and whispering symphonies across the ashen field of star craters around her. Unnamed ghosts follow her every breath, scraping and clawing and forcing their way out of her throat like dying screams.

“Athena.” 

She could not tell you her name, but the memory tastes like death in the back of her throat. She could not tell you her purpose, but she stares at the dirt beneath her and wishes she was buried in it. She feels fear for the first time in eternity, feels ripped open and spilled across the world like a plague of despair.

She wonders, if she looked into the reflection of her tears would she seem unsightly? If the ground swallowed her whole, would someone carry her memories to the stars? Would they be heavy?

There is a pain around her neck, like a chain branded into her alabaster skin, and her fingers are cracked and bruised as she touches the crater left where flesh used to be. A scar erodes her beauty, cracked like sediment six miles underground. The pain is smoldering coal inside her, daring her to touch it, daring her to scream, daring her to-

“Athena.”

She kneels to the pit like it is a king with a crown of bloody jewels- prays to it like it could rebuild her fragile bones and make them stronger.  
There are no roots beneath her to hold her down, yet she feels too heavy to move an inch. Every breath is an abyss, lungs filling with the question why.

Why am I here. Why am I lost. Why am I hurting. Why am I?

She wonders who she has become, now that she cannot remember who she was. Does it make her different? Does it make her new?  
Her body is unfamiliar, her mind an empty canvas waiting to be filled with the ink that floods inside her veins. She wonders what her skin hides beneath it, and if it was as big as it feels. 

Oh how massive it feels. The loss. The nothing inside her.

It felt the size of planets- a great big, celestial thing inside her that she could not scrape out. Her flesh was too tight, her being too small.   
For it is so difficult to keep lightning contained to it’s bottle.

She does not know it, but they will tell stories of her later. Tell stories of the monster she becomes, the monster they shaped her into. Holy fingers mold the clay that is her legacy and carve into it a frightening beast. They will turn her into a wretched thing with vile tongues and hateful eyes. They will speak of a cave of death, where she keeps the ghosts of her heartbreak, where she waits for the next to dare draw eyes upon her.

But they will also speak her name in prayer, whisper it like something divine. Her story will become a subject of debate in even the grandest of halls and her beauty a warning to all that might dare to question denial.

But the future is for the oracles, not broken dolls left with nothing but the breath of a memory.

“Athena.”

And so she stands on dirty feet, with serpents in her hair, and the storm trembles around her. For she stands in the corpse of who she used to be, and the womb of who she might become. She smells like decay and honeysuckle, her wine lips drawing in the next breath like the flowers soak the rays. Her fists are weapons at her sides, her fingers claws as she pulls herself up mud soaked stairs.

She feels as if she should be dead. As if she is half holy and half grave. But her past is but an enemy that tried to destroy her, and yet did not have the strength.

They say the devil deals at the crossroads, where sits the in between. A world between worlds. They tell you not to seek the devil, my dear, for they have walked on hooves of death and carry a mighty blade. Be careful of the devil, little girl, for messy hands will drag you down to hell.  
But the devil deals at the crossroads, and their hands are cleaned with holy water whiskey. They do not walk on the hooves of beasts, but instead the metal spine of a railroad track.

And the girl with no memories had no where else to go, for she knew not who she was. There is no home for mysteries, no home for whispered memories. 

But the train spewed black promises from it’s engine, and the lights within glittered like starlight. Gentle. Welcoming. Hopeful. The heat inside was a comforting one, filling the gaps in her clay with molten gold.

So the girl with no ticket embarked on a train with no track. And though her skin still feels like echoes, and her words are empty memories, there is a ring of gold within her eyes and a power behind the promise of something more.

“Athena.”


End file.
